Plane-Wave Decomposition of Acoustical Scenes Via Spherical and Cylindrical Microphone Arrays

Spherical and cylindrical microphone arrays offer a number of attractive properties such as direction-independent acoustic behavior and ability to reconstruct the sound field in the vicinity of the array. Beamforming and scene analysis for such arrays is typically done using sound field representation in terms of orthogonal basis functions (spherical/cylindrical harmonics). In this paper, an alternative sound field representation in terms of plane waves is described, and a method for estimating it directly from measurements at microphones is proposed. It is shown that representing a field as a collection of plane waves arriving from various directions simplifies source localization, beamforming, and spatial audio playback. A comparison of the new method with the well-known spherical harmonics based beamforming algorithm is done, and it is shown that both algorithms can be expressed in the same framework but with weights computed differently. It is also shown that the proposed method can be extended to cylindrical arrays. A number of features important for the design and operation of spherical microphone arrays in real applications are revealed. Results indicate that it is possible to reconstruct the sound scene up to order p with p2 microphones spherical array.